Lieberman Will Not Be Missed

Six years later, he was drummed out of his party because of his willingness to embrace Republicans (he received a kiss from George W. Bush after a State of the Union address).

This isn’t what happened. Lieberman was defeated in a primary election because of his continued willingness to back a disastrous war and to embrace the incompetent president who launched it. If that weren’t enough, Lieberman then began hectoring members of his own party because they disagreed with his pro-war position, and started posing as one of the last heirs of FDR and Truman. While doing all of this, Lieberman was characteristically sanctimonious and condescending as he dismissed the opinions of the majority of his party on the war, and then feigned shock that most Democrats didn’t want him representing them any longer. Lieberman wasn’t punished at the polls for bipartisanship as such. He was rejected because he took a position on a major issue that most Democrats in his state rightly considered intolerable, and because he showed contempt for Democrats opposed to the war.

Instead of accepting his primary defeat with some measure of grace or humility, he then insisted on running against his party’s nominee. He managed to win the general election mostly because the other party’s nominee was a joke and many national Republicans rallied to his side. Instead of being chastened by the experience of repudiation by his own party, and instead of learning something from the public’s increasing opposition to foreign wars, Lieberman spent the last six years agitating for new conflicts in which the U.S. could be ensnared. In each case, he wasn’t putting the interests of the country or his constituents first, but was privileging an activist foreign policy over both. When he leaves, the Senate will better off for having one less reflexive hawk in its midst.

A suitably fawning biographer is most likely gearing up for action, selecting a word salad title for Lieberman’s bio, with one or all of the words “Courage”, “Stand”, “Bravery”, “Fight” in consideration.

I’d like to feel pleasure at all this even while knowing the Senate is still awful, but I know Lieberman will be as large in politics as ever. Plus he got to leave on his own terms, even though he would certainly have lost a Senate race.

You’ll likely have to keep hoping. Nobody can ever stop praising Lieberman it seems. He continues to be the most untouchable man in Washington. He’s spent the past eight or so years annoying Democrats, harassing the grassroots, cozying up to Iraq dead-enders, and endorsing Republicans. All the while, the party has had little to say. Even when he outright campaigned against them in 2008, they refused to even so much as condemn him.

I have always thought of Lieberman as a card carrying member of the War Party, first and foremost. The right / left charade was always secondary for him. His only quandary was whether he was more pro-Likud Israel or more anti-traditional America.

I think the difference is that in 2000, Lieberman was mostly seen as a pretty conventional, center-left Dem. It was only later that he let his extreme a-hole flag fly. Palin, on the other hand, showed everyone exactly what she was the first time she opened her mouth.

Expanding upon my earlier comments, Gore-Lieberman represented the height of New Democrat/DLC neoliberal dominance of the party. Which, in my opinion, is part of the reason for it’s defeat. Now that progressives have the upper hand, they won’t try to defend that legacy because there’s not much positive to defend. The remnants of neoliberalism, on the other hand, tend only to defend Lieberman and chastise Gore for running a “populist” campaign.

If you’re really angry about Lieberman, blame William F. Buckley, Jr., who backed him against incumbent Lowell Weicker in the very close 1988 Senate race. Given Lieberman’s extremely small margin of victory (688,499-678,454) Buckley’s support may have been decisive, in at least persuading conservative Republicans to sit out the Senate race, if not actually vote for Lieberman.

And the worst of it is that Connecticut ended up getting both Lieberman (in the Senate) *and* Weicker (as governor in 1990-94).

This reminds me of Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas who is the bag man for many politicians. In an interview in the weekend WSJ, he stated why he became Republican. It was McGovern. He believed that the Republicans would support Israel far more than McGovern, so he switched parties. The point is that he switched parties no on the basis of what was good for the United States. He switched parties on the basis of what he thought would be good for Israel. Unfortunately, I suspect Lieberman holds similar sentiments.

One comment that I will be happy to see go to the boneyard: “The Democrats dumped Lieberman because he supported Bush on the Iraq War.” Nonsense; it was the Democratic voters of CT who dumped Lieberman in ’06, despite support from Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer (among others). Or were the citizens of the Nutmeg State supposed to overlook the fact that Lieberman couldn’t win a majority of his own party?

Let’s not forget the VP debate in the 2000 election. Lieberman announced from the outset (again, sanctimoniously) that he would be “positive” and avoid “negative personal attacks.” He was debating Dick Cheney! Certainly a little negativity was warranted…

6 years ago I had the unfortunate pleasure to spend a flight from Los Angeles to D.C. sitting next to Mr. Lieberman. To this day I have never met a more glib, arrogant and condescending person anywhere in this world. There was not even one shred of humanity present. How this man ever convinced people to vote for him is beyond me. I am still trying, so far unsuccessfully, to banish the image of Joe out of my memory.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with DavidT. Lieberman was a product of Buckley, who had a grudge against Lowell Weicker. Weicker was pretty much a washout as governor, but he was a giant in the Senate, and was one of the last of the “Maverick” Republicans before we had to settle for the mostly spineless “moderate” Republicans to represent the supposed “big-tent” of the party.

Lieberman decided that he was smarter than the Democratic voters in CT, and so should disregard their defeat of him in the ’06 primary, and was then smarter than the whole Democratic Party and should support the neo-con president and his cabal. He was whining about “partisanship” when some real opposition to the neo-con Republican agenda was truly warranted.

One interesting thing about Lieberman is that he advocated for changes to Senate rules to rein in the filibuster. These changes would have made the tactics Lieberman employed ~ in holding up the health care law until it got the changes he wanted, for example ~ ineffective. Perhaps his advocacy of Senate reform was an act, because it hadn’t any hope of being put into law.